A young woman, let's call her Jane, survives a car accident. Her injuries are so severe that she is diagnosed as being "in a vegetative state," or what medics call unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. Yet scans show that her brain responds to the sound of someone else's voice. So is Jane conscious or unconscious? The answer is that consciousness and the unconscious might be much more similar than we think. Recent developments in cognitive science provides empirical evidence that the unconscious brain is able to perform almost all the activities that we (wrongly) think are exclusive to conscious beings. This means that unconscious beings are not only cognitively active, but might also experience emotions-both positive and negative. The very idea that consciousness is not a requirement for feeling emotions opens up a minefield of questions for how best to treat unconscious people, like Jane, who despite their unconscious state might still feel pleasure and pain. Clearly, we need to examine